Fowey Lit Fest.

In the week  when I'm due to speak about The Fifties  Mystique at the Fowey Literary Festival - on Thursday 9 May , at 11.45 -  I've just received the perversely timed information that the print edition  has sold out. Luckily the e-book edition is now available  -  though somebody has yet to solve the technical problem of providing an author's autograph for an electronic book - and another print edition should be available quite soon.

            If you're anywhere within reach of Fowey this week and next, the Lit Fest is well worth a visit. Freed this year from its association with Daphne du Maurier, it has an interesting programme, and its setting is ravishingly pretty. There can be few places as charming  at this time of year. 

I'm going to be speaking on day two, after a session about Fifty Shades of Feminism, a collection of essays exploring "the many shades of being a woman", and just hope that, by the time it's my turn, the audience won’t have had enough feminism for one day.

The Running Heroine

The "Running Hero" is a character who appears in a series of books. Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, even Miss Marple can be described as Running Heroes.
In my crime novels - 20, so far - there are several running bit-part players, such as the solicitor whose client-list includes otherwise unconnected characters. The fact is that even my stand-alone novels are nearly all set in the same world, and some of the people  in them  appear in more than one book, not always as the central character - for example, the archaeologist Professor Thea Crawford, who is the heroine in THE ONLY SECURITY and takes a minor role in several later books.
One of these not-quite-heroines is the psychiatrist Dr Fidelis Berlin. Several critics and commentators have called her my most interesting character, and I found myself wondering if she/I could discover more about her background.  How did she come to be the unaccompanied, unidentified infant who arrived in England on a kindertransport? I didn't know the answer myself , but then, I never do.  If I were not making discoveries as I write I'd have no interest in doing it..
The book that answers those questions  is coming out in June.
 DEAD WOMAN WALKING tells the story of Fidelis Berlin, and also reveals what happened to some of the characters in my very first book, A CHARITABLE END.
It was first published   40 years ago.

BRIAN SEWELL ON ANTHONY  BLUNT

In today's Sunday Times, the second volume of  Brian Sewell's autobiography is serialised. One section is about his help to Anthony Blunt when the press had just discovered that he was one of the "Cambridge traitors."  I read Sewell's words with revulsion.The controversy about the Cambridge spies is old history now, but I remember it well - and also, its background. For growing up in the 1950s, one was  permanently conscious of the Cold War, and of the threat of Hot War, which would  inevitably lead to nuclear annihilation. I suppose we were afraid, though I don't remember feeling fear until I had children to protect in the 1960s; after that, of course, one lived in dread of nuclear war.   The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the most terrifying periods of my life.
        The point of all this is that the fear was of something real - nuclear war.  The threat was genuine. And the people who secretly worked for the Russians  were not romantic heroes, and they didn't have the right to follow their consciences. One can forgive their behaviour when they were young in the 1930s, before everyone knew the full horror of Stalin's Russia, but they didn't recant or repent after the war. Instead they continued as  traitors to their country, to the people they knew, to  their families. They wanted to  destroy European civilisation, and near as dammit did so. 
          It's fine to look back  now it's all over and forgive one's enemies, but don't  ever look back and underestimate their culpability.  Anthony Blunt's  actions  were intended to bring the world he had grown up in  to a hideous end.
         Some people have suggested that his later life as an academic art historian and art adviser to the Queen  redeemed the crimes of his youth. I doubt if those who died as a result - admittedly indirect  - of his treachery would have agreed. In fact,  anyone old enough to remember the Blunt-fuss and the Cambridge Spies and Burgess and Maclean - in fact anyone for whom The Fifties Mystique  is the stuff of memory  - will take a view of their own. I'd love to hear what it is.

JOBS FOR THE GIRLS?

A shamingly or shockingly long gap since my last post, partly (but only partly) explained by my being away on holiday for a while. Back in Cornwall now, in the wet wind that has become our default daily weather. Although summer visitors, usually confined to more prosperous resorts, are seldom aware of it, this is still almost the poorest county in the UK, and still qualifies (along with  Sicily  and Northern Portugal, for special EU subsidies. As has  been said, when England sneezes, Cornwall  gets pneumonia - which will be even more noticeable if the present government really introduces regional rates of pay in public service jobs, as it has threatened. When I was first involved, as a "quangaroo" - a member of quangoes - with the public services (NHS etc) there were regional rates of pay, which ensured  that nobody from more prosperous areas would ever apply to work here, because it meant a drop in salary. Do we want to re-introduce immobile and aggrieved workers in the public sector and a low (because uncompetitive) standard of work? Yes, says one feminist friend. The chaps, she thinks, will be leaving in droves  before they get stuck for keeps in a low-pay area, which will mean more public sector jobs going to women.
Which is not , I told her, what I'd call another triumph for feminism.

Bletchley Park

 

Bletchley Park is the new 3 parter on   ITV1. It features four women who, as girls, worked as code breakers in that ultra secret establishment. By the early 1950s the lives of these clever, ingenious women have dwindled exactly as I described in The Fifties Mystique. The dullness of domesticity, the deference to men, in fact all the least enviable aspects of women’s lives in that period, are neatly shown or hinted at. But  these particular women re-group and get going – in fact  they independently invent a theory of geographical profiling decades before it came into official use, and find the body of a murder victim when male officialdom had failed. The period detail seemed flawlessly researched – except for the usual  mistake: if you see a man wearing his hat indoors, you can be sure that nobody who actually remembers the period was involved in the filming.

Sockpuppetry

I don't entirely get the point of the current fuss about Stephen Leather and his "sockpuppets".
This story has been much discussed by writers since the crime writer  Leather admitted, on stage, to creating online fake identities to promote, talk about, and praise his own books. He even admitted to arranging discussions between these different personas to make the whole thing look a little more genuine.
Leaving aside the other accusations made against Leather (who, by the way, I've never met) I don't really see what's so dreadful about lying on line. It's an extension of what nearly everyone does: we use pseudonyms, invent false birthdays, give invented addresses, tick a box confirming that we have read the small print though we haven't even glanced at it.............and who has never contributed mendacious praise about  a friend's  new book? I love the virtual world but don't trust it, and  believe what I read only when a real person has published it  using his or her own real name.
Please tell me if I'm wrong - but also tell me why!

Lit Fest

If you want to talk, or  hear me talking,  about The Fifties Mystique, do come along to the Penzance Literary Festival this  Friday, 27 July, when I'll be doing just that in Trevelyan House, Chapel Street, at 2 o'clock.